Week #002

The Herbata Journey

Well, another week has come and gone. Time for another recap. The past seven days were a relatively low-key in the grind. This won’t be a very long crazy post.

This post is coming out Sunday night because the team got together Friday night for a dinner to celebrate our launch and Christmas. It’s really important to take time to celebrate your wins. If you’re like me, I spend all my time looking forward to what needs to happen next which often makes me forget to take the time to celebrate what we’ve done.

Thankfully, the rest of the team doesn’t operate this way and so maybe I’ll begin to learn to take a night and just smell the roses ;)

A big thanks to Oak+Cru for hosting us.

Stories from the Week

When we first launched Herbata in early December, we knew a lot of people that weren’t avid tea enthusiasts, but the people they love, really enjoy tea. With this in mind, we launched two products initially. Our primary product was our monthly subscription, and the secondary was a three-month subscription. We imagined the three-month would be a perfect for those who wanted to gift it to their loved ones.

Since this was our expectation, we created a one-page printable PDF people could include in their cards before they sent them out. The purpose was to introduce the recipient of the gift to Herbata, and allow them to to ‘claim’ their box and provide us with a shipping address.

I went forward and designed the one-page template and generated discount codes in our website. I assigned each discount to an order that we could keep track of which gift purchases were claimed. I spent about 2 days in total getting it designed and every PDF generated ready to be printed.

I then reached out to our customers in individual emails asking if they were gifting their purchase or if they bought for themselves. To our surprise, over 80% of the orders were actually for the individuals themselves rendering most of the work I put in useless.

The lesson here: do work that actually matters, not work you think matters. The time I could have saved by simply asking if people needed something upfront rather than making the assumption would have been about 5 hours. Luckily, in this case, it wasn’t a huge waste, but still time that could have been optimized.

Announcement of the Week

On Friday night, Herbata wrapped up its first comment/like/tag-a-friend campaign. Congrats to Spencer for winning! We’ll be starting to do more of these in 2017 so stay tuned for that! :)

Thought of the Week

This isn’t necessarily something I learnt this week, but it’s worth mentioning anyways. Once you realize your happiness is 100% up to you and it’s not dependent on your parents, your siblings, or your significant other, you begin to realize you have full control to make decisions that can make you happier. If you go to bed and you aren’t completely happy right now; you need to change something. It’s completely up to you.

I want to wish everyone reading a Merry Christmas. I hope you have a phenomenal week filled with family, friends, and happiness!